There's some discourse about whether RSS(*) readers should be designed like email inboxes or not. There's a number of good points being made, and one of them is that it is a choice to make "unread" a state within the user interface, and this choice ought to be questioned.

On the other hand, I have a few contrary thoughts.

1. The layout of desktop mail clients used to be far better, when there was a full-width table of messages on top and a full-width message view below. No current RSS readers that I know of are laid out in the old fashioned way, so I think the question should be rephrased as "Do we want our newsreaders to be designed like crappy modern mail clients?" For me the answer is "No", but this doesn't have anything to do with the differences between email and news. NetNewsWire Lite from ~2006 was, in my opinion, a more usable app than the current one.

2. One of the reasons suggested for why newsreaders should not behave like email inboxes is that news reading is consumptive, and replies are not part of the model. That's currently true, but I actually believe we should move toward RSS Reader+Writer apps, where you *do* reply (directly onto your own blog) from the news reader. In that case, the email client model is actually a good place to start, and what is needed is to think carefully about the aspects of email that are stressful and the aspects that are empowering.

I'm all in favour of getting rid of "unread", or coming up with a new kind of state model that prevents one's news from feeling like a todo list. But I believe the future is bidirectional RSS, and email is a good start.

(*) By "RSS" I mean both RSS and Atom and JSON Feed, etc. Any kind of standards-based syndication.